A good day, but an imperfect outcome for Australia in Trump-Albanese meeting
Napoleon said: give me lucky generals. Albanese is surely the luckiest politician in the Western world.
China – announcing the intention to apply absurd restrictions to the export of any product containing any Chinese-sourced critical minerals – almost guaranteed that the rare earths and critical minerals deal that Kevin Rudd had been trying to sell in Washington for months would win enthusiastic acceptance from the US President.
Nonetheless, any politician who gets good luck must also make that luck work.
This has been the single most successful foreign policy effort from the Albanese government. It wasn’t a perfect outcome. There was no relief on tariffs even in the sectoral areas where some nations have received relief. There was no regional agenda from Australia, such as reviving the Quadrilateral Dialogue. And we still have to see how the rare earths agreement actually unfolds Nonetheless, this was a nine out of 10 performance by the Albanese government and it deserves credit for it.
The meeting was way too late in coming. A year of Trump’s four-year electoral cycle passed before the first substantial meeting and real engagement. But having recognised that problem, the government in recent weeks and months did everything it could, publicly and privately, to make the meeting happen and make it a success.
The government from the Prime Minister down sang Trump’s praises over the Gaza ceasefire; cabinet ministers – in particular Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy – visited Washington and worked up awareness and enthusiasm; so did Treasurer Jim Chalmers, so did senior officials; Rudd was his normal hyper-diligent self across every part of the US system he could gain access to.
This sort of effort is necessary when you’re dealing with Trump, but not always sufficient. Trump was in a very good mood and passed out rhetorical, and some actual, benefits for Australia.
Albanese got almost everything he wanted from this meeting.
First, he got a personal benediction from Trump. The President is notoriously mercurial. He might love you one day and hate you the next. But the presidential personal blessing is immensely important for the rest of the US system. It’s a sign that no-one in the US system should be hesitant about being forward leaning towards Australia because of any hesitation on the president’s part.
It’s also the case that Trump pays little attention even to his own bureaucracy. Probably Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his eldest son, Donald Trump jnr, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and a tiny handful of others are the only formal sources of advice Trump takes seriously. And those are based on personal relationships more than institutional positions.
Until now, Trump has not had a personal relationship with Albanese much at all. Now they’ve spent several hours in each other’s company. Trump would also be briefed that Albanese faces almost no opposition at the moment and is at the start of an electoral cycle, so there’s absolutely no incentive to try to play games inside Australian politics.
This is all good for Albanese within the US system, and also good for Albanese with the Australian electorate, which doesn’t like Trump but does value the alliance. It would be good if this is the start of a closer personal relationship, if Trump at least sometimes seeks to catch up with Albanese at multilateral meetings such as APEC. Similarly it would be a very good thing if Trump occasionally consults Albanese about the Australian view of China, or similar matters.
It remains to be seen whether that will happen, but it was a very good start.
Albanese also got an official Trump benediction for AUKUS and even a promise that Australia would definitely get its Virginia-class submarines in due course. This was hugely important. It won’t in the end be Trump’s decision because it is in 2031 that the then American president has to decide whether transferring Virginias to Australia would compromise US capability. Trump’s promise is nonetheless very important. If the next president is Vance, he will probably feel bound by a Trump promise that he will be deeply socialised into over three more years of AUKUS activity under Trump. If it’s a Democrat in the Oval Office, even a left-wing Democrat, it would be a huge thing for the US to repudiate a deal that was made under a Democrat, Joe Biden, confirmed by Trump, and for which Australia will by then have paid billions of dollars with many more billions to come.
That still doesn’t finally guarantee the AUKUS deal, not least because Trump said: “We (the US) have got plenty of submarines.”
That’s plainly wrong. The US Navy, the shipbuilders and every congressional report acknowledges the reality that the US is miles behind schedule in producing submarines for its own use. Trump is prone to changing his mind, when he decides one day to give weight to facts that he ignores another day. One day he tells Ukraine it can win all the territory back that it’s lost to Russia; the next day he tells Ukraine it must accept Russian occupation of the territory Moscow now controls.
But Albanese can’t be expected to cover every possible permutation of Trump’s future mood swings. It’s as good on AUKUS as Australia could have expected, especially given the previous eerie silence from Trump on the deal.
The rare earths deal is in some respects the most important. But the basic reality here is one that both US and Australian policy makers have been slow to confront. China will always produce rare earths at a price below cost. No company, indeed no defence force, will go to a non-Chinese supplier unless required to by their government, or unless the price of the non-Chinese supplier is effectively subsidised.
Thus you’re not spending a bit of seed money to help an infant industry (to mix the metaphors a bit) grow to maturity. You’re permanently subsidising an industry because you believe an allied supply chain is a security necessity. Some people call that socialism; others call it national security capitalism. It doesn’t really matter what you call it so long as you do it.
But what if Trump and Xi Jinping make a deal at APEC this month or early next month? What it Trump declares he has brought peace to trade tensions? It is in Australia’s interests to zealously implement this deal and keep the US up to its commitments.
By the way, the most significant thing Trump said all day was that he thought there was no chance the Chinese President would launch a military strike on Taiwan. Trump is flat out wrong on this. It’s not at all clear what Beijing will do. Nobody knows what Beijing will do. Certainly Trump doesn’t.
Finally the byplay between Trump and Rudd, and Rudd’s reported later apology to Trump about insulting earlier tweets from before his ambassadorship, seems to have cleared the air. Rudd was ill-advised to make those social media posts when there was a chance Trump would come back to office. But Vance used to say equally rough things about Trump. Trump “forgives” people who apologise, recognise his glory and are likely to be useful to him.
Rudd has been an extremely effective ambassador. He is the strongest element of the Albanese foreign policy team and far more a cold-eyed realist on China than any of the senior figures in the government. The opposition’s criticism of Rudd is inevitable but misplaced. They’re on much more convincing ground in pointing out that if the rare earths deal is to succeed, the Albanese government will need to revolutionise the manner and speed with which it approves new mines and the like.
Many things conspired to create a historic opportunity for Albanese. He is the gold-medal winning Steve Bradbury of Australian politics, prevailing simply because he stays upright as all his enemies and all his obstacles fall over of their own volition.
It’s still a government which pursues a lamentably anaemic defence policy, there was a spectacular lack of regional ambition in the meeting, and all of Canberra’s pre-existing weaknesses remain. But this was an excellent day out for the government which got almost everything it could possibly wish for, and by doing so served Australia’s national interest.
US offers Ukraine NATO-like security guarantee
Mission accomplished! For Anthony Albanese, and for Australia, it was a very good day and a very good visit with Donald Trump in the White House.